I recently began a month-long road trip with my friend Tyler. We are traveling from Sacramento to Austin, with liberal stops along the way to see various parks, cities or other culturally relevant attractions (assuming COVID-19 hasn’t done them in).
What’s most exciting to me about this trip is that the Southwestern United States is perhaps the broadest swath of territory I’ve yet to have seen in our country, and almost 100% of the trip falls within that territory.
The plan is to traverse the following major stops:
- Murphey’s, CA
- Lodi, CA
- Curry Village, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, CA
- Bishop, CA
- Death Valley National Park, CA
- Horseshoe Bend, AZ
- Flagstaff, AZ
- Scottsdale, AZ
- Tucson, AZ
- El Paso, TX
- Unknown! (Possibly Roswell).
So far we’ve visited Yosemite National Park, doing a very long (~18-20 miles) hike around the Valley, known as the Yosemite Valley Grand Tour.
The hike was definitely a long one, we began around 9:30 AM, and didn’t get home until 9:30 PM. At one point I forgot my camera on the trail (near Illouette Falls) and had to run down the mountain we had just climbed about 20 minutes to recover it. Thankfully I ran into two women who had been park nature guides before COVID that were on the trail and picked it up for me on my way down.
We slept well that night.
Here are some pics from the trail:
by Taylor White